Modelling situation awareness relations in a multiagent system

There is broad consensus that situation awareness (SA) plays a key role in agent-based modelling of complex sociotechnical systems. However in the social sciences and human factors literature there are different views on what SA is and how it could be modelled. More specifically, one school of research considers SA as the process of gaining awareness, another school refers to it as to the product of gaining awareness, whereas the third school sees SA as a combination of the process and product. Typically, agent-based modelling of SA is done from the second view for each individual agent, possibly with additional social components to enable interaction. Current developments in multiagent systems indicate that social abilities and relations between agents should be not an addition, but at the core of any model of a sociotechnical system. To address this issue, we develop a mathematical modelling framework of SA relations between agents which supports all three views. The use of the framework is demonstrated by an example of retrospective accident modelling from the aviation domain